Memorial-area residents sue city to act on flooding
Officials dispute claims that construction has contributed to problem
A group of Memorial City residents sued the city of Houston and one of its local redevelopment authorities Wednesday, complaining that they approved commercial development in the area without requiring adequate stormwater mitigation, resulting in increased neighborhood flooding.
Claiming violations of the federal and state constitutions, the west Houston group Residents Against Flooding, joined by several individuals, is asking the court to compel City Hall to prioritize neighborhood flood relief by expediting drainage projects in residential areas, temporarily halting commercial building permits for projects on large lots in the Memorial City area and appointing a ‘special master’ to oversee efforts to alleviate flooding.
The plaintiffs also are looking to bar the redevelopment authority for Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone 17 from executing new private development agreements until drainage infrastructure in residential areas is improved.
They are not seeking monetary damages.
“The defendants’ actions and in-
actions — knowingly sending storm waters into the residential neighborhoods that lack adequate infrastructure, without mitigation or necessary infrastructure improvement, and favoring projects for the private commercial interests at great expense to the residential interests — should shock our collective conscience,” the lawsuit states.
Mayor Sylvester Turner said the city intends to be responsive to residents’ concerns and contested the claim that it has favored one group over another. “Lawsuit or no lawsuit, I will never make the representation that we can take steps to totally eliminate flooding. That’s not in our control. But the city will do everything that it can to mitigate the risk of flooding,” Turner said. “People are angry. They don’t want their homes flooded two, four, six, seven times. I got that. I understand that. But instead of fighting a lawsuit, let’s put our efforts into trying to mitigate the risks of flooding.”
David Hawes, whose firm manages TIRZ 17, declined comment on the lawsuit.
Memorial City residents have been up in arms about stormwater detention since the area flooded in 2009 — damaging roughly 500 homes, according to Residents Against Flooding — and again took on water during last year’s Memorial Day storm and this year’s Tax Day flood.
Among those affected was Dean Bixler, 59, whose home northeast of Memorial City Mall flooded in each of the storms.
“The city’s not doing enough,” said Bixler, who purchased his home in 1996. “They know the area floods, yet they continue to allow development with the raising up of these large-acreage properties without mitigating, and they know (the water) has to go somewhere.”
Construction blamed
The lawsuit cites the 2007 widening of Bunker Hill Road north of I-10 and the elevation of nearby commercial properties, among other projects, alleging that they displaced water into surrounding neighborhoods.
City and county officials, however, say that new developments have been required to offset their potential flood impact since the mid-1980s. “We’ve been closely following the effects of the mitigation and any changes in the watershed since the criteria went into place, and so, when we get a major rainfall event, we go back and analyze it with those computer simulations to make sure that the watershed is responding the way we’d expected it to. And what we’re seeing is that absolutely the mitigation that’s being done with new development is producing the exact results that are expected,” Harris County Flood Control District Executive Director Mike Talbott said, not specifically referring to lawsuit. “We’re not seeing a worsening of the flood conditions.”
Newly appointed city flood czar Steve Costello echoed Talbott. “It’s easy to point at change,” Costello told the Houston Chronicle last week, also speaking broadly. “It’s natural for someone who’s not familiar with what I do for a living to say, ‘Hey, they built that, and I got flooded.’ It’s natural for that to happen. … We’ve got to do a better job of convincing the public that we’re addressing these issues, which we haven’t done in the past.”
Costello said government, ideally, would be able to step in to reduce flooding, since developers only are required to keep flood conditions from getting worse. “Absence of funding — we haven’t been able to, over all these years, to make it better,” Costello said.
Similar to previous case
Residents Against Flooding’s lawsuit has some parallels to a case set for a rehearing before the Texas Supreme Court, Harris County Flood Control District v. Kerr, in which residents along White Oak Bayou said the county allowed upstream development without building sufficient infrastructure to detain and divert resulting floodwaters. The plaintiffs in that suit allege that constituted a ‘taking’ of property, and are seeking compensatory damages under state law. Harris County disagreed. “For hundreds of years there has been this concept of government immunity. Government cannot insure all communities against all acts of God,” Harris County’s lead attorney on the case, Melissa Spinks, told the Chronicle last year. “The reality is, Harris County has always had a flooding problem, since the Allen brothers started a community here. We have not stood by and refused to perform the acts that would prevent flooding. If there was an easy fix, we would have done it.”
The state Supreme Court ruled that the plaintiffs had enough evidence to call for a jury trial, but eight months later accepted the county’s motion for a rehearing.
Though Residents Against Flooding’s lawsuit, filed in federal court, also alleges deprivation of property rights, it seeks to compel the city and the TIRZ 17 Redevelopment Authority to mitigate flood risks, rather than claiming compensatory damages.
“It will be interesting to see if that Kerr case sets any sort of a precedent on the arguments,” said South Texas College of Law professor Matthew Festa, who specializes in property and land use law. “While the facts of today’s case might be compelling, they face a high barrier on a lawsuit that asks the court to tell other governmental bodies how to spend money or what to do.”
“The city’s not doing enough. They know the area floods, yet they continue to allow development with the raising up of these large-acreage properties without mitigating, and they know (the water) has to go somewhere.” Dean Bixler, homeowner